Supercomputers/Systems/SSC-21
South Korea · operational · hpc
SSC-21
Operated by Samsung Electronics at Samsung Electronics (undisclosed site) .
Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- 25.18 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 31.75 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 79.3%
- Cores
- 204,160
- Power
- -
- Per watt
- - GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 plus | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Accelerator | - NVIDIA A100 80GB | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | - AMD EPYC 7543 32C 2.8GHz | AMD | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 200 Gb/s per port · About 0.6 microseconds Infiniband HDR200 | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Samsung Electronics' earlier GPU cluster, one generation behind the already-recorded SSC-24 at the same undisclosed South Korean site. HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 Plus nodes pairing AMD EPYC 7543 hosts with NVIDIA A100 80GB accelerators over InfiniBand HDR200, debuting at rank 11 on the November 2021 TOP500 list and still appearing (much further down) as of the June 2026 list. As with SSC-24, Samsung has not stated a workload publicly; the all-GPU node design and the fact that this is Samsung's own internal machine at its own site make chip design or AI infrastructure a plausible read, not a sourced one, so workload class is recorded as hpc and confidence stays at reported, matching the precedent already set by the SSC-24 row.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-09-24 SSC-21 added (Samsung Electronics)
Source check
We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| top500.org | names system and part | NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.
Further reading
Inside a node
Latency-optimised versus throughput-optimised processors, NUMA, and the end of the host-to-device copy.
The interconnect
Topologies, why latency and tail behaviour matter more than bandwidth, and how the fabric market consolidated.
Operating a supercomputer
Acceptance testing, why "installed" and "in production" are six months apart, and the machine lifecycle.